Good evening! Last weeks ESNZ Performance Coaching forum saw us flooded with questions, so much so, it was hard to keep up! Here is a new one that we ran out of time for last week.... Q: How important is it to surround yourself with like minded and positive people vs negative people? Janes Answer: Very important! There is a saying that goes that you are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with… why is this so? Because the people you hang out with, your tribe, influence your behavior by either supporting or negating your belief systems, and influence the standards that you set for yourself. Success, happiness, confidence, joyfulness are a formula. It’s not that successful or positive people experience less adversity than anyone else, it’s that they have learned to consistently direct their focus and take action to ensure the most empowering outcome. That way of living and behaving is contagious. Say for instance it’s a particularly dreary day and you are at home with your friends. You’ve had a big week and you feel a little tired, you’re not sure that you want to ride. If one of your friends leaps off the couch and grabs their boots, determined not to miss the next training session, chances are you will leap to attention to. If they grab a packet of biscuits and turn on the TV, you might swing the other direction. This is a fairly banal example, but what you want is people who constantly challenge your beliefs about yourself and push you to do better. You want to be around people who cause you to raise your standards, so that your normal way of operating becomes one of excellence, of passion and of motivation. Further to this, I believe that when you surround yourself with a group of people on a consistent basis, you form an identity that you are held to within the group. Take for instance the following hypothetical example. Say you have classified yourself as a nervous rider and for the past few years have always competed at level one dressage. If you surround yourself by people who feel similar to you, who classify themselves in a similar way and do little to move beyond it, you will form an identity as part of that group that can be very hard to break away from. Even if you don’t want to be there, there is comfort with the group. It’s familiar. Deciding to behave in a new way, to implement new strategies and move forward can be difficult, as in doing so, you often cause people to look at their own actions, and there can be some discomfort in doing so. When people feel that kind of pain or discomfort, they react in one of two ways. They either applaud you and see you as a motivating force for them to do the same, or they try to bring you back down to their level by impressing on you the stupidity of your new behavior, and try to re-enforce in you your previous limiting associations. These types of associations can be very hard to break, as people associate moving forward as painful, and then the feeling of loss becomes stronger than the potential pleasure of moving forward. You have to be really strong at this point and realize that the good ones will come with you, the ones you need will always be by your side. If you can see success as a filter, then it will never be a problem.
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 07:01:08 +0000
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